Skip to 0 minutes and 14 seconds Good day, my name is Andre Roux. I’ve been involved in futures studies, futures research, thinking about the future for about the last 20 years in various ways. One is at this university. We have an institute for futures research. It’s been around since 1974, which has quite a few, around about 100 corporate and government clients, who want to know more about the future and how to use that knowledge to formulate their strategies. My other involvement is being in charge of two post graduate programs on future studies. Either way, I think a very important feature in reality of human beings is we have almost a love-hate relationship with the future. On the one hand, many people fear change. They fear the future.
Skip to 1 minute and 0 seconds They fear what might happen. At the same time, we crave to know more about the future. And since time immemorial, we often find ourselves thinking not so much about the past but about the future. In fact, that’s one of the exciting things about the future is only space and time that it can influence. Having said that, we can’t predict the future. That’s not the intention of any program or course related to thinking about the future. The intention that applies equally to this course is to equip you with various ways and means– structured ways and means, tools, which will enable you to get a better knowledge about how the future may unfold in different ways.
Skip to 1 minute and 41 seconds Hopefully upon completion of this course, you’ll be better acquainted with some of these tools, the way of thinking. Like in any discipline, we have different ways of thinking per discipline. You’ll hopefully discover that thinking about the future is both a science and an art. And you’ll discover that tools, such as scenarios, are something that can be used in an everyday context, not just by experts– to not fear the future but embrace the future, to embrace change, and to use that in preparing ourselves individually and collectively for a more desired, more ideal kind of future.